During the month of May 2021, I'm intensively working to launch my home cupcake business, 'Phoebe's Cupcake Treasures'. My main focus will be on social media marketing and managing the business' finances. The entire project is a massive and exciting challenge, since I'll be learning a ton of entrepreneurial skills and monetizing my baking passion. Please click here to find out more!
What I accomplished this week
As I intended from last week, I spent week three into the project with a focus on pushing out more social media marketing content and sorting out a finance management system. I was also able to design my product packaging, which was a task I intended to complete in week one, but couldn’t due to delays in the manufacturer’s process.
The tasks I completed were:
Created 6 Instagram/Facebook posts and 4 stories
Finished setting up a business bookkeeping system on Google Sheets
Designed my cupcake packaging and sent it to the manufacturer for printing
Implemented a time-tracking system using Clockify
Posts
Stories
Bookkeeping spreadsheet on Google Sheets
Cupcake packaging design on Canva
What I learned
Organizing business finances
This was the task I struggled with the most during the project. At first, I experimented with free accounting softwares like QuickBooks and Zoho books. I found that those software's were too complex for what my small business needed, so I decided to create my own bookkeeping system on Google Sheets. This involved heaps of research to grasp fundamental accounting and bookkeeping principles. Once I became more acquainted with this, I found free bookkeeping templates online and tweaked them to fit the needs of my business.
Although I initially planned to complete the bookkeeping system by week 2 but couldn’t, I’m extremely happy that I finally established a spreadsheet that works for my business.
Overcoming perfectionism
I experienced a lot of resistance with posting business content on social media. Last week, I found that creating social media content was a lot more difficult, since I often felt nervous and had the tendency to overthink the quality of it. However, this week I made an effort to scrap perfectionism and just push out more social content. Overcoming this resistance is an achievement I'm proud of as I became more efficient with posting and was less stressed.
Getting more efficient
Tracking the time I spent on tasks in the business was one of the best decisions I made this week. By using the app Clockify, I'm able to know exactly how much time I'm putting into the business. I realized that it took me a total of 10 hours to make 50 cupcakes. Given the amount of money I made from that sale and the time I spent, I found that the sale was not profitable at all. This information was valuable as it helped me become more time-efficient, such as by preparing ingredients in advance.
Plan for next week
Continue rolling out Instagram content to promote my cupcake business
Document all of it
Write a sales policy
Polish up project deliverables
Click here for my week 2 update.
Click here for my week 4 update.
Click here to see the rest of my project!
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